The Ventura County District Attorney’s Office on Wednesday announced a $500,000 settlement with Anterra Corp. over hazardous waste at its Oxnard-area oil waste facility.

Senior Deputy District Attorney Mitchell Disney said the civil complaint stems from unlawful practices under the site’s previous operating group from 2012 to 2014. The settlement was finalized last month and includes a permanent injunction requiring a laboratory analysis of all waste material headed for Anterra to confirm it is not hazardous.

The Anterra facility on East Wooley Road includes an old oil well that no longer produces oil, Disney said. But the company has special permission from the state Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources to use it to dispose of oil field waste from other sites, Disney said.

It is not permitted to receive oil field waste that is hazardous, but prosecutors allege that’s what was happening under the previous group, Disney said. The facility is now overseen by the Staben family, which has owned the property the facility is on since the 1800s, the company said Wednesday in a news release.

“Once we became aware of those violations, we immediately met with the county and other regulators to understand what the prior owners had done and instituted a system of testing and best practices to mitigate their past management practices. Upon review, our proposed management and monitoring systems were approved by all the regulators, including the County of Ventura,” Anterra President Frank Staben said in a statement.

Buy Photo

GRETCHEN WENNER/THE STAR
Boxes of evidence were taken from Anterra's Santa Paula office by Ventura County
District Attorney's investigators n September 2014.(Photo: GRETCHEN WENNER/THE STAR)

In September 2014, a series of search warrants at the company’s headquarters in Santa Paula and the Oxnard-area site led to authorities seizing records to determine whether the business was engaged in the alleged disposal of hazardous waste.

Anterra operates the only commercial facility in Ventura County that accepts oil field waste from petroleum producers. The fluid, described mostly as brine, is reinjected into the ground.

“In evaluating the case, it didn’t seem like a viable option or worthwhile to pursue someone that was in the wind,” Disney said.

That left prosecutors with the option of civil litigation and it meant the Staben family, the people who took over the facility’s operations, had to deal with the mess, Disney said.

The Ventura County District Attorney’s Office would not have settled with Anterra if prosecutors did not believe the company was out of compliance with the law, Disney said.

Prosecutors and Anterra’s attorneys were in talks for some time about a settlement and once there was a resolution, the civil complaint and proposed settlement were filed in Ventura County Superior Court. The settlement was signed by a judge Dec. 21.

The settlement includes a permanent injunction that requires screening of the waste for unauthorized materials with the results being sent to the Ventura County Environmental Health Division as well as the state, prosecutors said.

Anterra said the terms of the settlement represent “the most rigorous testing and operational standards in the region.”

According to the company’s news release, they include:

The generators of the waste (oil field producers), must test all waste material prior to shipping to the Anterra facility.

The testing must be performed by an independent laboratory.

Records of the tests are set up for public access and review on the DOGGR website and through the Ventura County government.

Of the $500,000, Anterra is required to pay $150,000 in civil penalties, $309,565 to the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office, $30,000 to the U.S. Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General and $10,435 to Environmental Health.

The company maintains that the permit issued by DOGGR was never violated.

Anterra’s operating permit for the 1933 E. Wooley Road facility near Oxnard was due to expire in mid-August, but the company has been allowed to continue operating while county officials consider the application for a 30-year extension to the permit.

The proposal was originally scheduled to go to the Ventura County Planning Commission last fall, but the matter was delayed to allow additional review of the proposal. The delay had nothing to do with the district attorney’s investigation, county Resource Management Director Chris Stephens said.

He said the schedule has been primarily impacted by the highly technical nature of the required studies and the time needed to review them.